`Another Thing'

Here’s a fine, puzzling poem by Eric Ormsby; “Another Thing,” from Daybreak at the Straits:

“To live in the body like a nervous guest;
To be confined in fingers and in feet;
To swing on the pendulum of what to eat;
To be subject to south and east and west . . .

“Behind my skullbone lives another thing
That fidgets anxiously as I barge by,
That swivels skyward its chameleon eye
For the interest in the twitches of a wing.

“My inmost dweller is predacious root;
Ransacks reality for steadfastness;
Adores the constancy of all dark stars;
Refuses thirst and thrives upon the brute
Benedictions of the wolf and lioness;
Loves the futility of fountains; preens scars.”

Reading this poem for the first time, I thought of a review of three volumes of Borges translated into English that Ormsby published in 1999 in The New Criterion. The review is titled “Jorge Luis Borges & the Plural I” and this is how it begins:

“It was ironic of fate, though perhaps predictable, to allow Jorge Luis Borges to develop over a long life into his own Doppelgänger. In a 1922 essay entitled `The Nothingness of Personality,’ Borges asserted that `the self does not exist.’ Half-a-century later, an international personality laden with acclaim, he had to depend on wry, self-deprecating quips to safeguard his precious inner nullity. `Yo no soy y’ (`I am not I’), wrote Juan Ramón Jiménez; this was a proposition that Borges not only endorsed but also made a fundamental axiom of his oeuvre. In his story `The Zahir,’ written in the 1940s, he could state, `I am still, albeit only partially, Borges,’ and in `Limits,’ a poem from the 1964 collection aptly entitled The Self and the Other, he ended with the line (as translated by Alastair Reid), `Space, time, and Borges now are leaving me.’

The notion of a divided self or, more accurately, a discrete, separate self, is a trope familiar to longtime Borges readers. Where Ormsby differs in this poem from the Argentine master is in the otherness of “another thing” – not “another I” -- that dwells within. I thought at first it might represent soul confined within a corporeal being – the traditional duality of Christianity. But Ormsby’s “other’’ is “predacious” – a hunter. This entity is primitive and dangerous. “Chameleon eye” reminds me of “lizard brain.” But Ormsby is no D.H. Lawrence or Ted Hughes, celebrating blood lust and animal wiles. There’s no “Iron John” swagger in the poem. Rather, the speaker seems to respect this primordial “inmost dweller.”

So, this poem is really not like Borges at all, for Borges – who is not without machismo in his celebration of the gauchos – is at heart obsessed with epistemology. Not Ormsby. The poem hinges on the speaker’s assessment of this “other,” and the assessment is mixed and only hinted at. That it “ransacks reality for steadfastness,” on the face of it, sounds almost commendable. Isn’t that what all of us do, and should do? Adoring “the constancy of all dark stars?” Less commendable, certainly, though hardly damning. And “preens scars?” I thought of Coriolanus and his refusal to do so: “To brag unto them, thus I did, and thus;/Show them the unaching scars which I should hide,/As if I had received them for the hire/Of their breath only!”

In the end, what is “another thing?” Good poems, unlike pop songs and children’s riddles, have no definitive key that opens them like a rusty lock with an audible click. The poem resonates for me because I have learned that parts of me, some of which I remain unaware of, dwell within, autonomously, perhaps dangerously, and forever other.